What upset me about that post is how either those employers did not state temporary remote work was part of the deal or they are hunkering down on having people in the office still. Right now that is a very irresponsible thing to do and for an industry who likes to talk about how they are changing the world for the best, they sure dont seem to be putting any effort into actually doing that at a time when we need it most.
I'm lucky enough to be able to work from home, and I'm having mixed feelings about it. As usual, there are pros and cons to everything.
Pros:
- Able to be at home all day, feel I have more flexibility.
Cons:
- I miss cycling to work.
- I miss getting out the house
- I miss chatting to colleagues
- I miss lots of indirect help from other developers.
I might feel differently if I had to drive to work, as I hated that. Now though, my commute is a 15 minute cycle down a clean, wide, and seperated cycle path which I love (especially in the sun!).
My job has been remote since last summer. I completely understand your cons - things which help are going out for walks or in your case cycling (I normally take a long walk to a coffee shop in the morning) and organising things to do in the evening such as meetups, dinner, a pint, etc. You have to be more active but it's nice when your social life is both good and unrelated to your job!
Today I set up a "lunch chat" in Jitsi and invited my coworkers during our standup. We ended up having a great discussion, and an unintended benefit is that our user advocate from our parent company that is only in our office once a week was able to join as well.
Outside of young, childless tech workers, this sudden remote work experiment is not going well for most people I know.
This isn’t the controlled trial of remote work that these think pieces suggest. Instead, everyone is forcefully stuck at home without time to prepare. Parents are juggling childcare with getting work done, while fighting an uphill battle against IT systems that weren’t prepared for everyone going WFH for every job at the exact same time.
Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to address it.
I don’t think we’re going to look back on this experiment and conclude that it was a net win for productivity or even for worker happiness.
> People are going to hate WFH/Remote work coming out of this it seems.
The question is, what are they going to do? There are two options... demand better tooling (I'm actually surprised about Microsoft Teams!) or go back to office and put up with everything related to a multi-hour commute - infection risk in public transport, gas/insurance costs, endless traffic jams, hours lost each day that can be spent with partner/s and children instead, or simply with sleep...
> or go back to office and put up with everything related to a multi-hour commute - infection risk in public transport, gas/insurance costs, endless traffic jams, hours lost each day that can be spent with partner/s and children instead, or simply with sleep
1. Workers (that previously hadn't been remote) realizing that it has good parts and bad parts, that paying an extra 10%+ in rent/mortgage in order to get a proper home office can be the cost of working from home (and then the costs of utilities for a now non-empty home). That doesn't mean it's bad, just that it has pluses and minuses.
2. Companies realizing that people working from home _does_ have benefits, and it's _not_ just people sitting around in their PJs being unproductive.
Then I think we've gained something. It's not a backfire, so much as a better understanding that everything has tradeoffs.
Your first point is the part I'd like most to change with this.
I live in an apartment with three other people. It's fine when we're all coming in and out and spend all day at work.
But now that 3/4 of us are at home, and confined to our rooms it's getting annoying. There's no good public space, and none of us share any interests.
I live and work in a single room, and I wish so much I could move to somewhere with more space. If I were full time work from home there's no reason I'd need to live with other people. The only reason my rent is so high is because I live near a city which I have to do to work. I suspect this is true for other people as well, and if we saw a greater amount of full time remote people would spread out a little.
I saw this in a company I worked at previously. When I joined they had just moved their headquarters from the West Coast to the Midwest and gave employees the option to WFH or freedom to come into office still at new location. Within a year it was a pretty even split on A) staying where they were and working remote B) moving to be in the suburbs around the new location C) moving further out from the city but staying on the West Coast D) leaving the company
I was playing it safe and assuming a family adding one more room to a multi-room house. The 10% is on the low side. Where I live, it's an extra $100,000 between a 3 bedroom house and a 4 bedroom (or adding a bonus room), and then bump that up another $50,000 for the total cost after mortgage interest, utilities, etc. But nobody (that goes into an office) seems to want to believe it costs $150,000 to work from home (but then you save some on commute costs, so there's that). My manager actually made a comment about how it must be nice to save money by working from home (commute costs). I laughed.
I live in the suburbs of a larger northeast city, so not inexpensive, but not city-apartment levels, either. Going from 3 bedroom to 4 bedroom seems to raise the asking price around 90k (from 450k to 540k). Admittedly, that includes houses of all ages/conditions/size/etc.
yes ... $4000 US Dollars for a one bedroom is literal crazy talk. Obviously, people are willing and able to pay those prices right now because they have to live specifically there to get those specific jobs. But if they could work remote, they could live anywhere their heart desires ... closer to family, closer to friends, closer to nature, closer to a local music scene, closer to the beach ... whatever their heart desires.
Obviously many people have laid down roots in those extremely high cost of living areas at this point so just moving can be tough, but we need to spread out man, cause $4000 a month for a tin can just ain't a good life.
At least on the east coast outside of actually being located in the hard urban part of the city, from what I've seen 1 and 2 bedroom apartments only end up being marginally different in price. For example, one of the places I was looking at had 1 bedroom apartments for around 1400-1500USD per month while their 2 bedroom apartments only increased in price to 1600-1800USD depending on whether you wanted a bit more square footage or 2 bath instead of 1 bath. Likewise 3 bedroom just notched up another 200USD and so on.
Yeah this sounds about right. This is the way it should be. I mean, hell, even that is a bit pricey TBH ... rent prices are generally out of control and need to come down. People have to be able to live without cramming into places with roommates like sardines.
this place im looking at is within walking distance of main street in a nice little town, just outside of a major metropolitan area(think 30-45 min drive), includes water & gas, and the the complex is on the water. Because of that I'd say the place was a steal.
Otherwise though I'd generally agree. Rent is getting crazy in the US.
That doesn't matter since WFH isn't popular right now. If 0.01% of people work remotely and then suddenly everyone ends up doing WFH then it is unlikely that more than 99.99% of people are going to hate WFH. So lets be pessimistic and say 99% of people end up hating WFH and only 1% like it. That's still a 100 fold increase in people who will do WFH.
I've been loving the comfort of working from home (childless), but I suspect you're right that it's not going well for most people. Most of my zoom meetings are disrupted by shrieks of needy children and a shocking number of cellphone ringing/notifications.
No sane person actually works from home with their young kids present, at least not in any real job. Until schools have their remote classes sorted out with actual teachers giving actual attention to students over video, nobody's going to be getting any quality work done.
It's easy enough to test whether someone is an INTP with an online personality test. Basically INTPs will look like autists. They don't talk unless asked and dislike the company of other people.
I don't know whose young kids you're testing on (and they're all different so you're right for some of them!) but all the ones I've met are glued to a screen at every opportunity. They love video calls and talking on the phone and interacting with people via screen.
I would assume running a team of 12 people being the first time in there whole careers working from that is planning global production for a multi billion dollar business is a real job. As trying to get a bootstrapped startup of the ground.
The first case is my wife, the second one me. We have two kids. For obvious reasons I had my office at home anyway. For two weeks bow it is WFH for both of us. Plus the kids at home. Tell you what, it works. Stress, sure. But it works.
Just a couple days ago, I spoke with a patient rep for a medical practice in metro NYC. She was obviously working from home, with a young child yelling, and pressing buttons on the phone. And obviously tense. So I just said that I understood that she was working from home, and that everything was OK. And then everything was OK, and her child quieted down.
Yep, I've been finding it comforting to talk about it (even briefly) to clear up some of the pressure. I think it's nice that you've done that and I appreciated it when someone brought it up similarly with me while on a call. It allowed me to relax a bit and refocus as opposed to just trying to ignore the interruptions and being anxious about it
That's key, I think. Way before Corona, I worked for a tram at Amazon that ended up to have three parents of small children on it me included. Q4 calls were fun, there were times were the children started to talk yo each other. Our manager was ok with it. Performance was good, things got done and remote work went perfectly well. A different manager could have easily had the opposite effect so.
Idk - the company I work for was totally prepared for this and the IT systems are absolutely OK.
Exceptions: weekly full-house meeting of 400 employees isn’t supported by hangouts so you can only participate in read-only mode
The only issue I personally have is my WFH broadband is horrible.
Basically what you’re saying is that “the company I work for does a horrible job of having it’s systems available for remote work”. But then it would also be true of other things
>Exceptions: weekly full-house meeting of 400 employees isn’t supported by hangouts so you can only participate in read-only mode
Those have almost always been 'meetings that should have been an email' in my experience. I think some leaders are just used to having an audience to be effective.
Obviously regardless of all the above, there will be permanent changes because of this, even if it wasn’t all voluntary and we can return to normal. I think we can be certain some things will change with respect to how people work as well as other behavior. For example, do we need all those extraneous stimuluses. Surely some people will overdo it in both directions. It all remains to be seen.
The changes during extraordinary times aren’t always permanent. Apparently female workforce participation during WWII was a record high but not in the decades that followed.
Yep, me too. Early 30s and childless. I've never liked working from home, and now I'm forced to do it. It sucks. I like having someone looking over my shoulder (look what I'm spending time on right now!). I like having a bus to catch at 3:00 so my day ends right there. I like having a commute that separates work from home. I like having people to talk to and make jokes with. I like having separate work and home computers. For me, the benefits of WFH are...? I honestly can't think of any.
>Early 30s and childless. I've never liked working from home
I'll chime in here.. perhaps you don't like working from because you are childless? In my opinion it's the the opposite of what people are thinking... I think you would find that the people who like working from home are ones with kids (let's say >5 where they can at least take care of themselves long enough without worry of instant death.. infants/toddlers are obviously an exception here, unless you have a stay-at-home spouse and a separate part of the home).
The reason is that when you have kids you have a day-to-day schedule with them that is vital for the family's sanity. Your kids also will start to have schedules like school & activities. Also, you simply want to see and spend time with your kids. Being gone/unavailable from the moment you wake up until 6pm might not be an issue for people when they are a little younger without kids, because they still have the whole night to do whatever. I was like that in my 20s. I worked until 6/7pm and I didn't mind at all. I had plenty of energy afterwards to unwind without basically a care in the world.
In my late 30s with young kids, I am supremely lucky to work from home (I have done this full time for like 7 years so this is nothing new to me). I get to spend a LOT more time with my kids, take care of the house (billions of more things to do with kids around), and all that jazz without worrying about being fixed into a schedule where I would never see them.
I guess I could go on and on.. but that's my view on all of this.
Not sure if this counts but I like working from home because I have a dog that I feel guilty leaving for 11 hours out of the day every weekday - especially if it's going to be a particularly rainy or hot day and he has to stay outdoors. He's pretty easy going so I don't have to play with him all the time but just give him company.
Also after getting into full time work I realise I have no time for anything, my schedule after I get home is pretty much cook dinner, dog responsibilities, and 1 hour of spare time before I have to sleep (otherwise I'm yawning throughout the next day). I've just made an extra 3 hours free in my day because I'm not commuting to work.
It definitely takes more discipline to work from home because I get easily distracted. And I think I wouldn't mind it being on an on/off schedule as opposed to 100% WFH. I usually like being alone but I can see it starting to creep up on me. Our team recently did a virtual lunch and it worked better than I expected!
I like having a separate work space, a separate work computer, and half an hour's bike ride between work and home. But you can still do those things while working from home, and you end up living cheaper with a more customizable workplace (I can play whatever radio I want, I can set the temperature how I like it...), and no-one looking over your shoulder (I really can't understand seeing that as a positive). If you try to just work in the space where you were living without adapting it at all then yeah it's not gonna go well. But there can be upsides once you've taken the time and effort to adapt.
It depends. On the days I've WFH in the past, it was clear that I could concentrate better. Now that I've been doing it for a week, there's no contest: I am definitely far more productive working from home, even though at work I have an office to myself. The interruptions, hallway conversations, miscellaneous noises are all gone. I can choose to temporarily ignore an email or a Teams notification; I can't ignore a noisy label printer screeching from across the office.
You re forgetting that people need time to adapt. Imagine if we did the opposite switch, we went from all being farmers to working in an office downtown overnight. It happened, but over many many decades. Of course it's not going to work for everyone, but many many people will adapt
I realized after I had kids that a huge amount of "new urbanist" thought is driven by the young and childless and does not incorporate the needs of people with children or of children themselves.
This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. If only one parent works it can be done, but if both parents have to telework it's a no-go.
Non-parents don't get it. It's impossible to get anything done with kids around. The only way I can imagine it to be possible is if you were to abuse and traumatize your kids so they'd leave you alone because they're afraid of you. Maybe that's what some of our ancestors did.
It's not possible now. I'd say a good 80% of the work I do requires at least a year of intensive study and/or hands-on learning to even be capable of attempting and another 5-10 years to master.
Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything. You can't start contributing to society until you're 20. Everything easy has been automated or outsourced.
> I'd say a good 80% of the work I do requires at least a year of intensive study and/or hands-on learning to even be capable of attempting
One year is nothing, really. As a farmer, the work I do required about a decade of study before I could be productive on my own, and I'm still working on mastering it. In the days of yore, farm kids had to start engaging with their teachers as soon as they could as it was the only way they were going to be able to be capable of attempting the practice once they reached adulthood.
> Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything.
Well, you need four years of college to get past the gatekeeping. Gatekeeping that is setup because the work has become so much more accessible, necessitating means to cull competition. You don't have to start as a young child nowadays like the farm kids used to have to. You can easily coast into adulthood without even thinking about a career.
Make it 5 years. If you start having the kid do it at six years old, he can be productive at eleven years old, can't he? Make it a slow kid and he'd still be productive at fourteen years old.
School and college is pretty much just to waste your time. None of the things you learn transfer well into work life.
I have a home office (proper office with separate meeting room etc, a whole floor of our house) and I still get a babysitter on days school is out and I can't not work that day. It's just not the same when you have to always reserve some brain cycles for thinking about what's going on in the rest of the house.
A few years ago (children must have been 5ish and 7ish?) my sitter cancelled last minute. So instead, I told my kids 'if you can play all morning, without fighting and screaming so loud that I can hear you, and not interrupting me, I'll pay you what I normally would have paid the baby sitter'. It was the first time they could make their own money, and it worked perfectly. I tried again a few days later and it failed and haven't had to try since. Maybe an idea for all those that now work from home the first time?
It seems that only once you have kids you realize how much of society that doesn't make sense to you is the way it is in order to accommodate the logistics of children and schooling.
I don't understand this at all. As someone who doesn't have children it's the extreme opposite to me. Modern society is actively hostile to having children.
It's both. As a non-parent, you can have a vague, high-level idea about the demands of parenthood, but there's a lot of crucial and non-obvious details that aren't communicated to people without kids - mostly because it's either super boring or really tacit knowledge. So the parts of society that are run by parents tend to be kid-friendly; the parts run by childless are the opposite.
Examples of nonobvious consequences of parenthood include:
- Parents of pre-teens tend to be constantly late for everything. That's not because of lack of organization, but because the kid will randomly soil their clothes or do something else that needs to be taken care of immediately.
- Parents are also constantly interrupted. Especially with the first kid, it seems everything is a life-threatening emergency, so the moment it even looks at you funny, you'll start calling your spouse at work to consult or coordinate a doctor's appointment. Some workplaces accommodate that (mostly those staffed by other parents), some don't. It becomes a question you start asking about on the interviews.
- Say your company offers to send you to a conference or a training seminar. You'd probably jump at the occasion (yay, free education and zero responsibility, all on paid company time!), but you might be wondering why your coworkers all refuse to go, and don't even show any excitement about it. It's probably not because they're lazy, or just dispassionate 9-5 workers. It's likely because they're parents, and you can't just go to a conference as a parent. It's a huge logistical challenge.
- Parents like big cars because of storage space. Going up and down the stairs with stuff gets tiring really fast, so you end up e.g. storing trolley and surplus diapers in the car. If you didn't want a car before, you'll start to want one now. This goes against the general trend of environmentally-conscious living.
- If you aren't addicted to coffee yet you will be after having a child. You'll also learn that polyphasic sleep is a real thing (if it wasn't, nobody would survive the first months of parenthood).
- You'll start talking about shit with other people. And I mean literal shit.
- You'll bankrupt yourself if you try to buy everything new for the kid; you'll likely and out of a sudden become super frugal and very aware of all local clothes/items exchange/giveaway groups.
- A babysitter isn't a luxury, it's mental healthcare in the city.
I could go on and on, but it's late and my kid will wake up in about 5 hours. I'll be drinking an extra coffee tomorrow.
The part where it was made illegal for children to work. Humans had children integrated into the things adults do, too. I don't even get who pushed for this. It just alienates young adults from life, opening paths for them to turn to drugs and other destructive behaviors.
For some non-parents, it's not obvious that being in the same room (or building) as the kid(s) is nowhere near enough. Small children in particular can only briefly occupy themselves; the rest of the time, they need your attention - and they will demand it, loudly.
That last part was something I didn't internalize until I became a father myself. There's no "you do your stuff, and I'll be looking to make sure you won't hurt yourself" with small kids. They won't just do their stuff, they want you to do it with them. On top of that, once they learn to move (even just by rolling around the room), it's always 5 seconds from "everything is fine" to "the kid is trying to lick the electrical outlet".
I wouldn't call it impossible, and I've been working from home on and off for quite some time. And no, my kid isn't traumatized.
It does take some juggling with time, the 9 to 5 schedule no longer applies as you have to spend time during the day with your kid, but it's no worse than the random and useless meetings and conversations you have at work. And you have to be patient and expect interruptions.
It can be done with some discipline. You shouldn't generalize.
Work / Family + Life is out of balance; I really hope that's what we, collectively, learn.
The lack of time for child care is the problem. I've observed a sibling that does have children being severely taxed daily (in occasional video calls across the country).
It isn't the working from home aspect that's broken, it's how little time "a normal job" affords parents, or even those of us who've yet to find a life partner.
Like you said, this is anything but a controlled experiment. People are trying to push through a lot of psychological stress right now. Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling — 2 young kids and a toddler in our case. It’s a lot.
If people look back at this period and use it to judge the effective remote work is, that would be pretty ridiculous. (Of course, some people who are fundamentally against remote work will do just that.) If one worked remote during a hurricane, and pretended the hurricane wasn’t the dominant factor, it would also be ridiculous.
But it is time to be asking, how could we be better set up at home? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our tools? Does the current schooling model work in the 21st century? Or is it too fragile and dependent on an old societal structure? Should we be paying teachers a lot more than we are?
Conversely, we should be talking about the ‘wisdom’ of open offices. Hindsight is 20/20, but wouldn’t regular old offices with doors that close implement a fair amount of physical distancing?
About the open-office vs individual- in this particular case though individual offices would have been just as dangerous, since the ventilation system is all connected. although I agree the lower density of workers would have helped.
Not disagreeing that the office setup wouldn’t make a difference. But there is almost no evidence that the virus can spread through ventilation. It can only be aerosoled in very rare instances (like during intubation) and droplets would fall to the ground before reaching the ventilation systems.
Squirm; While yes, air systems are shared, modern offices (and homes) have filtered (though likely not HEPA filtered) positive pressure outlets and there is a central (hallway or more typically edge of building) negative pressure return.
While this virus does survive in aerosol form, it is not strictly airborne; This means that a non HEPA filter will likely stop it and that, from the return side; it's more likely to settle on the carpet or furniture than particularly infecting a human.
The more likely issue would be meetings of more than 1 person in a poorly ventilated room with no airflow; where aerosol virus would linger.
I think maybe we don't need a controlled experiment. Maybe we need to embrace a situation where we are forced to adapt and come up with solutions on the fly.
I was talking with a friend and former educator last night. She's been thinking about the child care and homeschooling issue a fair amount; how parents can organize their day (such as when to take lunch) to best care for their kids.
Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video),
I think there's an opportunity to self-organize people to address these things. Out among all of us us, there's enough expertise, desire and shared need.
Ah! You know, kinda, yeah. Combine educators who can produce detailed lesson plans with performers who can deliver them, kinda like a lecturer and a TA, and it really is reminiscent of the Primer.
I've been thinking about this lately since I'm rereading it while my WFH with a 5 year old who needs to be educated.
Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education.
For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment.
That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.
The primer ... I used to dream about building this when I had kids , still do :)...
Especially when I see a lot of parents being clueless/mishandle raising kids.
I've got a group of online friends from my alma mater that were thinking about this, and a bunch of the single folks volunteered to entertain kids over videochat for an hour or so, and they actually organized a Google Doc & Hangouts link to try it.
So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other.
My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me.
As a parent, I see two big problems with it:
1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.)
2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.
Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling
I was a homeschooling parent and was, briefly, on the board of directors and the lead mod for an educational organization because of it.
Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed.
This is not true.
One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning.
Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three.
Public school teachers typically deal with classes of twenty or more students. Homeschooling parents have a much better student-teacher ratio and the one-on-one teaching is much more intensive than public school education.
You and your children will both experience rapid burnout if you try to spend eight hours a day actively teaching them. You don't need to and you really shouldn't. It's an unsustainable pace.
One thing that stroke me yesterday looking at my 13-year old is that children actually suffer more than adults. While we are allowed to take occasional walk out of our homes ( groceries, etc), they are totally locked up - no friends, no school socializing, everything is virtual only. If this lockdown lasts for any long period of time, it might backfire badly on them.
This is a really good point that I think people will slowly figure out.
We live in a rural area with essentially no school age kids nearby, so we're very aware that during summer, Christmas break, etc, we have to arrange ways to keep our 10 year-old in contact with kids his age. In summer we usually sign him up for the in-school daycare a couple days a week so he can see his friends and we also arrange to visit other families with kids he knows frequently, trips to the park, library, etc.
However, in the current situation, that's all gone flying out the window. A least, because of where we live, there's lots of space to go outside and play without coming into contact with anyone outside this household. I shudder to think how quickly we'd all go insane trapped in a small apartment!
Bias warning: I am a public school teacher myself.
And this is also exactly what I feel the people who are now pushing for online schooling in general don't get (apart from the fact there's a non-negligible part of the population that doesn't have consistent/good internet access). There's a lot more to school than just going and learning 'stuff that doesn't affect real life', as some seem to believe. It's about social learning as well, and they're completely underestimating how much this happens in schools.
Because maybe in their experience - it definitely was in mine - it didn't happen at all in school. I always disliked school because of the other students that got in the way of my peaceful life. Never had a single friend throughout school and college, either.
Maybe you think social learning just happens by putting kids together, but that's bullshit. People like me who'd needed it the most didn't get any of it during school. There also wasn't much in regards to an education. In hindsight, school was a complete waste of my time, that at times negatively affected me because of bullies nobody did anything about. If only beating was still a thing when I went to school, then the teachers maybe would have beaten the shit out of the bullies, so they'd have to first spend a week in the hospital before getting suspended on top of that. Sorry, thinking of school always makes me angry.
> Maybe you think social learning just happens by putting kids together, but that's bullshit.
Not to put too fine a point on it—but I don’t think that very many people who work in education think this way. Especially not the teachers running the classrooms. You leave children to their own devices and you get Lord of the Flies, which was written by William Golding, who based the book on his experiences as a schoolteacher.
My personal advice, as someone who “survived” school, is that intense feelings of anger in reaction to school add too much color. You have to wait and let the logical, non-angry patterns re-emerge in your own mind each time that anger reappears.
So not being the majority makes it okay to completely dismiss me? Was corporal punishment bad for every kid? Is waging war bad for everyone involved? It's a dishonest question.
Children/teenagers are also losing a time of their life they will never get back. For example, if you're a junior in high school looking to get recruited to college for a spring sport, you're basically out of luck. This kind of extended hiatus from everyday life can alter entire life trajectories.
Sure. The kids who are disadvantaged are the ones who were poised to have a breakout year this season. So recruiters just won’t notice them, as opposed to the prospects that were already known.
Basically, anyone is disadvantaged who would normally have a small window of opportunity to prove something right now.
Something to note is that depending on where you live, people can still go outside. They just need to stay away from people. If you live in a suburban or rural environment odds are there are at least walking paths nearby. Go on a walk, run, or bike ride. Nothing in those activities requires interacting with others as long as you keep a mind to keep your distance and they do wonders for keeping the cabin fever at bay.
Not meaning to rant, just something I wanted to get off my chest since people keep talking about being trapped indoors when practising social distancing (not quarantine. people under quarantine need to stay as isolated as possible).
In France at least, the lockdown already stipulates no bike riding. And even if one goes out for a walk or jog, one cannot go more than 1 km from one's home. This situation is expected to last many weeks more. Cabin fever is a real concern.
In Spain no walking, biking, jogging etc is allowed. If you have a dog, you can walk it max 100m from your home.
But as I said above, we, adults can understand and cope with it easier than kids. And sadly, when we make our decisions, needs of children often is an aftertought.
That's a fair point. I wasn't aware that any state had placed those kinds of restrictions but I suppose it is reasonable when in a densely populated area. I could however see this kind of restriction getting unreasonable and unenforceable very quickly.
childcare workers won't be 'working from home' so not sure how this woould be a problem once the scare is over.
Unfortunately ppl with children are usually against company wide WFH flexible policies. I am guessing is just jealously. I have a coworker right now that asks ppl working from home in the morning meeting " oh so you are working from home today", so annoying.
Ppl with children please don't ruin it for the rest of us. we support you too.
I've been working remotely for a while, but most of my colleagues work in the office by choice. First thing I noticed, our remote meetings are much better now. It works better when everyone is remote.
Another thing that surprised me, many of my colleagues don't have a good working environment from home. They live in small appartements, sometimes with young kids, and mostly don't have an office or even a good laptop.
> Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to address it.
Agree. It takes self-discipline not to follow this to closely.
> They live in small appartements, sometimes with young kids
That's most likely the reason why they "work in the office by choice".
Back when I was still working in a physical office, I couldn't understand why someone would want to escape from their home into an office. As a WFH father of an infant, I fully get it now. Working with a small child nearby pretty much precludes any regular focus or deep working sessions.
> Agree. It takes self-discipline not to follow this to closely.
Indeed it does. I've never wasted so much time obsessively reading the news like over the past month.
I'm childless tech worker and I hate working from home.
I live in very small flat and I simply don't have space to separate work/home related stuff. I'm really struggling to focus on work task and when I finally do it I have problem to stop working (and end it too late). When in office someone will always ask why I'm still working or I will get hungry and food is waiting at home so I need to leave. Also video conferencing is poor replacement for talking with others.
»8:45 each weekday morning, I drop off my four-year-old at preschool, hug him goodbye, and drive back home». Well, in that case it wouldn’t be a challenge at all for us. Here kindergarten and schools are closed, and it’s quite a challenge to produce full workdays whilst taking care of two little ones at home.
A challenge. Lol.
Like most parents trying to work and take care of kids, I’m guessing work gets like 15-25% of your time. But you still want the full amount on your paycheck.
Oh yes parents just have it soooooooo hard. They made the choice to have kids, they should love with those choices.
Parents already get so many additional benefits at work compared to those without children, plus all the excuses to not do work/leave early. It’s discrimination.
> Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to address it.
+1 for this. I'm 100% remote, as are many members of my org, and we're struggling to deal with the big changes happening. Webex and Zoom occasionally drop audio or just straight up drop people.
Also can't underestimate the kids thing. For example, my boss has 8 year olds who LOVE to sing as loudly as possible -- ask me how I know :)
I'm not sure that viewing this as some kind of dry run for a future in which we all work from home is particularly fair, on multiple fronts. Firstly, this isn't a choice anyone has made, it's something which has been forced upon them. Working from home is (for some) great, but in its present state, many are restricted from leaving the house unless absolutely necessary, and so we're not so much "working from home" as "living from home". I think is a crucial difference, because people are currently denied any physical form of socializing, not merely during working hours. The speed at which this situation was forced upon us, also means that few of us have the separate room with perfect working conditions which a typical full-remote worker might.
From the perspectives of the companies it's also unfair to look at their hiring habits and speculate on their attitudes to working from home. Many companies are struggling to meet payroll, fighting with uncertainty, and desperately trying to form new communication structures in order to support the business. During such time, of course hiring is not going to be a priority.
Speculating on the outcome of this nightmare seems somewhat foolhardy, and extolling the virtues of working from home myopic given the many people who now find themselves struggling or out of work, ill, or forced to work in what are increasingly dangerous environments.
What self-isolating future? In the USA, as soon as coronavirus blows over the boss will say: "Okay, back to work. I need you in the office during core business hours." And hour+ long commutes will come back with a vengeance.
It's part of American work culture. It's a form of virtue signalling. By showing up at the office every workday, early in the morning, you are indicating your commitment to the company and to delivering value for their investment in you. Executives and managers won't give that important signal up.
Indeed, many people just don't have that much to offer apart from showing up. Unfortunately, this includes those who put themselves between the money and the productive part of the population. So nothing will change.
> By showing up at the office every workday, early in the morning, you are indicating your commitment to the company and to delivering value for their investment in you.
It's all opinion based. When I first started WFH a few years ago I would sometimes go to a cafe/coworking space. Now, I never do, I much prefer to stay at home.
Just because you and your specific likes and dislikes don’t agree with WFH everyday as a viable approach doesn’t make it “a joke”. I’m perfectly fine and productive with it.
Working from home isn’t about just moving people from an office to home. It’s a culture the e tire company has to adopt for it to be effective. The way people communicate, meet, schedule, etc. You need to prioritize asynchronous communication, you need managers that don’t feel a need to babysit adults, you need to record many things, you need software that makes for seamless collaboration.
You need a company policy that gives at least a $1k budget for home office supplies like chairs and desks.
And you do need some offices for people to congregate to and for field operations if you have them. And you need policy to allow for personal office rental for those that don’t live within a commute to an office and can’t work at their home.
And employees need to get used to a more independent way of working. That they can set their own hours, etc.
I'm strongly of the opinion that a company that cannot work remotely is a company that has poor communication and processes. While working in an office does have benefits, the habits that remote work forces you to have by necessity benefit on-premise companies too in my opinion.
I am not sure if company must give everything to remote workers. Remote worker has immense gain of avoiding wasted commute time. I happily pay by myself for an extra room and equipment just to avoid this wasted time.
I am working for a company where all decisions are made and communicated during lunch break in the canteen or near water cooler. At the moment the managers look pretty clueless, they have no idea how to start written communication.
You do it because it's worth it. The fully loaded cost of an employee that doesn't need an office space is more than made up for with a $1k or so budget. Getting someone out of a physical office saves the company thousands a year in many places.
Additionally, you want your employees to have a comfortable environment as it makes them more productive. If you're going to make your company a distributed company than you need to take some of the savings from not operating large offices and invest it in the remote experience.
I have been WFH for more than a decade. I love it. Being a planned transition, I prepared for it, set things up properly, have appropriate separation, etc. If someone didn’t know, they would have no idea that I wasn’t in some type of office. No doorbells, kids screaming, dogs barking, because of a proper setup.
In spite of this, I have been pretty worthless the last couple of weeks, primarily due to all the distractions of what’s going on.
When you consider that for many people, WFH started immediately with little time to prepare a proper setup, who are also trying to figure out how to be part-time teachers, PLUS the distraction of the current state of events, I suspect that most companies that didn’t do WFH before the crisis will reconvene when this is all behind us and say “WFH was a disaster, productivity was trash, and we’ll never do it again.”
If that happens, it would be a sad outcome, because under proper circumstances WFH can be a great lifestyle benefit with equal or greater productivity than an office environment.
It’s not going to stay like this. Everybody who is hiring today, unless they were already remote friendly, are already openly saying “we do remote for 3 to 4 months and then bring everybody on site”.
This absolutely will be the future of society. It was already happening and this will just accelerate it. Between streaming, gaming, video calling, food delivery, online dating, etc..., we're already most of the way there. Social spaces are shut down for the foreseeable future and might never recover.
As someone who's made a living in the restaurant sector most of their career, this is both terrifying but also exciting. Delivery was never the most exciting prospect because the economics were, for the most part, worse than dine-in, but in the absence of dine in maybe people will want expanded offerings? Lots of things to think about.
I, too, am strongly hoping this will radically evolve our society to leverage more technology. I really wish the US stimulus package would instead focus on investing in re-educating the population online for those that made their living in the service industry and the like. Furthermore, automating that work and doubling down on promoting a work from home culture. This is how we prepare for the next epidemic.
In my opinion, a bad economy is the best time to get an education. My extreme hope is getting closer to our cyborg future by furthering advancements in digital communication and human-computer interfacing.
I raised this on Ask HN to little fanfare so hoping people could opine on my thoughts here:
Does anyone else worry that the natural progression from this mass WFH will simply lead to outsourcing in other countries instead of hiring American?
Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails,” does it concern you all that the next logical step is to double down on platforms facilitating a WFH culture during the inevitable recession? The last recession in 2007 saw very slow job growth (compared to other recessions) simply because companies opted to adopt technology rather than train+hire expensive labor. I fear that the next leap will be widespread prioritization to set up satellite offices in India and other countries where labor is cheap. If I were a Fortune 500 CEO, my top priority during the coming recession would be to offset the lack of H1Bs in the US and just go straight to the source- because I know every other CEO would be doing the same. I fear for my future prospects a year from now.
This has been a fear for 30+ years now. And it seems like at the end of the day, for most companies, the decrease in cost of labor does not offset the increase in costs resulting from miscommunication, poor training, lack of care in quality of work, and increased times to delivery.
One of my takeaways from this situation is that there's been too much dependence outside the country. I actually think this situation will result in bringing some level of previously outsourced work back onshore.
This may go hand-in-hand with a (degree of) rolling back the uber-capitalism of sacrificing long-term "anything and everything" for the potential of an immediate bump to the stock value.
So far for me and my family, Coronavirus has been a relatively minor inconvenience compared to what others are apparently going through. I already do remote work from home and hardly go anywhere other than to get groceries or takeout.
I began doing remote work about 8 years ago while homeless. It was a good solution for my circumstances and it was a good solution for my health issues that were the actual root cause of my financial problems and homelessness.
Doing remote work has helped me protect my health and grow gradually healthier when that's not supposed to be possible. So I can't help but wonder how many people with serious health issues could be healthier if they lived more or less under quarantine.
I also homeschooled my special-needs sons for years. One if them has the same medical condition I have. They also have other issues.
As a homeschooling mom, I was a remote volunteer worker for an education related organization. They helped me get to a related conference on the other side of the continent where I was a very low level presenter.
I feel strongly that people with "quirks" -- health issues, ADHD, etc -- are the ones at the most risk of homelessness because they just can't make a "normal" life work and we do a generally poor job of telling people that there are lots of other ways to live and work, you just have to find the ones that work for you.
I've spent some years trying to develop websites and the like to help homeless people and people at risk of homelessness to find ways to make their lives work. I think remote work and other "irregular" work options are key to that.
I've never gotten much traction and the past decade has cured me of childhood brainwashing where I was always at the top of my class and the world around me kept saying I mattered and all. At this point, I'm quite convinced that I shall always be perpetually ignored.
I think I can make my own life work, so I sort of don't care anymore. But it seems like a missed opportunity because I already know so very much about germ control, working remotely, etc.
I'm not sure what my point is. I'm not sure I have a point or that there is any point to trying to talk to with people about this. Recent years have painted me as some kind of clown that no one should take seriously.
I think a lot of these decisions are going to de facto be made by the usual suspects for whom "normal" life works well, which is how and why they got into power. And I think that fact will help insure that people conclude that this doesn't really work and it needs to be temporary and it's imperative we return to "normal" as soon as possible.
But working from home was the historic norm. Family farms and craftspeople with a shop in one part of the building and their home in the same building and even retail establishments with the owners living upstairs was the norm for much of human history. Separating our living and working spaces is relatively recent. It's the weird and new thing.
My father was old enough to be my grandfather and I grew up with a garden in the backyard and a father who hunted and am mother who sewed a lot of my clothes. It was, in some ways, like a throwback to a prior century.
So those "old ways" are kind of living memory for me. And I never know how to effectively talk to people and say "No, seriously, it doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to accept these kinds of problems as the price for having a paycheck or something."
I hope we embrace a philosophy that gives people more options, not fewer. I hope we can find the opportunities and the upside in this situation.
But most people don't really want that. People don't like change. They hate hearing that something like this has a silver lining. So I'm not very optimistic that we will.
If you don't derive satisfaction from your productivity and instead are optimizing you're output:effort ratio, remote really pays off. On-site only is skewed towards increasing output since effort is largely fixed, but remote allows you to begin trimming effort quite a bit.
But a lot of people treat work as more than a transaction. That's fair but not for everyone.
Working from home is a godsend! Yes, now's not the time for the litmus test but for most people, their commute is the most stressful time of the day, at least under normal circumstances. We are not working under normal circumstances at this time but as a net result, the Earth's air is becoming cleaner, we're burning tons less fossil fuel and although I understand the demands of child-rearing while trying to be productive, we are getting to spend more time with our families.
Don't allow the stress of the situation to color your judgement of work from home. It is a good thing in our modern time.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 227 ms ] threadThese are the companies on the forefront of technology and zero opinions have changed.
Pros:
- Able to be at home all day, feel I have more flexibility.
Cons:
- I miss cycling to work.
- I miss getting out the house
- I miss chatting to colleagues
- I miss lots of indirect help from other developers.
I might feel differently if I had to drive to work, as I hated that. Now though, my commute is a 15 minute cycle down a clean, wide, and seperated cycle path which I love (especially in the sun!).
If I lived in a rural area I'd probably be outside working on a new deck or garden, but I live in a city and I'm stuck in an apartment.
This isn’t the controlled trial of remote work that these think pieces suggest. Instead, everyone is forcefully stuck at home without time to prepare. Parents are juggling childcare with getting work done, while fighting an uphill battle against IT systems that weren’t prepared for everyone going WFH for every job at the exact same time.
Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to address it.
I don’t think we’re going to look back on this experiment and conclude that it was a net win for productivity or even for worker happiness.
The question is, what are they going to do? There are two options... demand better tooling (I'm actually surprised about Microsoft Teams!) or go back to office and put up with everything related to a multi-hour commute - infection risk in public transport, gas/insurance costs, endless traffic jams, hours lost each day that can be spent with partner/s and children instead, or simply with sleep...
This one unfortunately (because, choice inertia)
1. Workers (that previously hadn't been remote) realizing that it has good parts and bad parts, that paying an extra 10%+ in rent/mortgage in order to get a proper home office can be the cost of working from home (and then the costs of utilities for a now non-empty home). That doesn't mean it's bad, just that it has pluses and minuses.
2. Companies realizing that people working from home _does_ have benefits, and it's _not_ just people sitting around in their PJs being unproductive.
Then I think we've gained something. It's not a backfire, so much as a better understanding that everything has tradeoffs.
I live in an apartment with three other people. It's fine when we're all coming in and out and spend all day at work.
But now that 3/4 of us are at home, and confined to our rooms it's getting annoying. There's no good public space, and none of us share any interests.
I live and work in a single room, and I wish so much I could move to somewhere with more space. If I were full time work from home there's no reason I'd need to live with other people. The only reason my rent is so high is because I live near a city which I have to do to work. I suspect this is true for other people as well, and if we saw a greater amount of full time remote people would spread out a little.
Where a one-bedroom is $4000, a two-bedroom is going to be $6500, not $4400.
Obviously a cheaper metro will have lower prices, but is the relative premium for an extra room also so dramatically lower?
Obviously many people have laid down roots in those extremely high cost of living areas at this point so just moving can be tough, but we need to spread out man, cause $4000 a month for a tin can just ain't a good life.
Otherwise though I'd generally agree. Rent is getting crazy in the US.
There really is no such thing. Remote teaching does not, can not, and should not work for young kids. It's not a university.
(source: life)
The first case is my wife, the second one me. We have two kids. For obvious reasons I had my office at home anyway. For two weeks bow it is WFH for both of us. Plus the kids at home. Tell you what, it works. Stress, sure. But it works.
Exceptions: weekly full-house meeting of 400 employees isn’t supported by hangouts so you can only participate in read-only mode
The only issue I personally have is my WFH broadband is horrible.
Basically what you’re saying is that “the company I work for does a horrible job of having it’s systems available for remote work”. But then it would also be true of other things
Those have almost always been 'meetings that should have been an email' in my experience. I think some leaders are just used to having an audience to be effective.
Edit: no children either, just easier to work with people in the same building sometimes.
I'll chime in here.. perhaps you don't like working from because you are childless? In my opinion it's the the opposite of what people are thinking... I think you would find that the people who like working from home are ones with kids (let's say >5 where they can at least take care of themselves long enough without worry of instant death.. infants/toddlers are obviously an exception here, unless you have a stay-at-home spouse and a separate part of the home).
The reason is that when you have kids you have a day-to-day schedule with them that is vital for the family's sanity. Your kids also will start to have schedules like school & activities. Also, you simply want to see and spend time with your kids. Being gone/unavailable from the moment you wake up until 6pm might not be an issue for people when they are a little younger without kids, because they still have the whole night to do whatever. I was like that in my 20s. I worked until 6/7pm and I didn't mind at all. I had plenty of energy afterwards to unwind without basically a care in the world.
In my late 30s with young kids, I am supremely lucky to work from home (I have done this full time for like 7 years so this is nothing new to me). I get to spend a LOT more time with my kids, take care of the house (billions of more things to do with kids around), and all that jazz without worrying about being fixed into a schedule where I would never see them.
I guess I could go on and on.. but that's my view on all of this.
Also after getting into full time work I realise I have no time for anything, my schedule after I get home is pretty much cook dinner, dog responsibilities, and 1 hour of spare time before I have to sleep (otherwise I'm yawning throughout the next day). I've just made an extra 3 hours free in my day because I'm not commuting to work.
It definitely takes more discipline to work from home because I get easily distracted. And I think I wouldn't mind it being on an on/off schedule as opposed to 100% WFH. I usually like being alone but I can see it starting to creep up on me. Our team recently did a virtual lunch and it worked better than I expected!
This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. If only one parent works it can be done, but if both parents have to telework it's a no-go.
Non-parents don't get it. It's impossible to get anything done with kids around. The only way I can imagine it to be possible is if you were to abuse and traumatize your kids so they'd leave you alone because they're afraid of you. Maybe that's what some of our ancestors did.
Kind of frowned upon now.
Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything. You can't start contributing to society until you're 20. Everything easy has been automated or outsourced.
One year is nothing, really. As a farmer, the work I do required about a decade of study before I could be productive on my own, and I'm still working on mastering it. In the days of yore, farm kids had to start engaging with their teachers as soon as they could as it was the only way they were going to be able to be capable of attempting the practice once they reached adulthood.
> Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything.
Well, you need four years of college to get past the gatekeeping. Gatekeeping that is setup because the work has become so much more accessible, necessitating means to cull competition. You don't have to start as a young child nowadays like the farm kids used to have to. You can easily coast into adulthood without even thinking about a career.
School and college is pretty much just to waste your time. None of the things you learn transfer well into work life.
A few years ago (children must have been 5ish and 7ish?) my sitter cancelled last minute. So instead, I told my kids 'if you can play all morning, without fighting and screaming so loud that I can hear you, and not interrupting me, I'll pay you what I normally would have paid the baby sitter'. It was the first time they could make their own money, and it worked perfectly. I tried again a few days later and it failed and haven't had to try since. Maybe an idea for all those that now work from home the first time?
Examples of nonobvious consequences of parenthood include:
- Parents of pre-teens tend to be constantly late for everything. That's not because of lack of organization, but because the kid will randomly soil their clothes or do something else that needs to be taken care of immediately.
- Parents are also constantly interrupted. Especially with the first kid, it seems everything is a life-threatening emergency, so the moment it even looks at you funny, you'll start calling your spouse at work to consult or coordinate a doctor's appointment. Some workplaces accommodate that (mostly those staffed by other parents), some don't. It becomes a question you start asking about on the interviews.
- Say your company offers to send you to a conference or a training seminar. You'd probably jump at the occasion (yay, free education and zero responsibility, all on paid company time!), but you might be wondering why your coworkers all refuse to go, and don't even show any excitement about it. It's probably not because they're lazy, or just dispassionate 9-5 workers. It's likely because they're parents, and you can't just go to a conference as a parent. It's a huge logistical challenge.
- Parents like big cars because of storage space. Going up and down the stairs with stuff gets tiring really fast, so you end up e.g. storing trolley and surplus diapers in the car. If you didn't want a car before, you'll start to want one now. This goes against the general trend of environmentally-conscious living.
- If you aren't addicted to coffee yet you will be after having a child. You'll also learn that polyphasic sleep is a real thing (if it wasn't, nobody would survive the first months of parenthood).
- You'll start talking about shit with other people. And I mean literal shit.
- You'll bankrupt yourself if you try to buy everything new for the kid; you'll likely and out of a sudden become super frugal and very aware of all local clothes/items exchange/giveaway groups.
- A babysitter isn't a luxury, it's mental healthcare in the city.
I could go on and on, but it's late and my kid will wake up in about 5 hours. I'll be drinking an extra coffee tomorrow.
when we moved from communal intergenerational lifestyles to the insular nuclear family. David brooks wrote a great piece about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from the office either, so I'm not sure what this means.
That last part was something I didn't internalize until I became a father myself. There's no "you do your stuff, and I'll be looking to make sure you won't hurt yourself" with small kids. They won't just do their stuff, they want you to do it with them. On top of that, once they learn to move (even just by rolling around the room), it's always 5 seconds from "everything is fine" to "the kid is trying to lick the electrical outlet".
I wouldn't call it impossible, and I've been working from home on and off for quite some time. And no, my kid isn't traumatized.
It does take some juggling with time, the 9 to 5 schedule no longer applies as you have to spend time during the day with your kid, but it's no worse than the random and useless meetings and conversations you have at work. And you have to be patient and expect interruptions.
It can be done with some discipline. You shouldn't generalize.
The lack of time for child care is the problem. I've observed a sibling that does have children being severely taxed daily (in occasional video calls across the country).
It isn't the working from home aspect that's broken, it's how little time "a normal job" affords parents, or even those of us who've yet to find a life partner.
Like you said, this is anything but a controlled experiment. People are trying to push through a lot of psychological stress right now. Families are suddenly responsible for homeschooling — 2 young kids and a toddler in our case. It’s a lot.
If people look back at this period and use it to judge the effective remote work is, that would be pretty ridiculous. (Of course, some people who are fundamentally against remote work will do just that.) If one worked remote during a hurricane, and pretended the hurricane wasn’t the dominant factor, it would also be ridiculous.
But it is time to be asking, how could we be better set up at home? What are the strengths and weaknesses of our tools? Does the current schooling model work in the 21st century? Or is it too fragile and dependent on an old societal structure? Should we be paying teachers a lot more than we are?
Conversely, we should be talking about the ‘wisdom’ of open offices. Hindsight is 20/20, but wouldn’t regular old offices with doors that close implement a fair amount of physical distancing?
While this virus does survive in aerosol form, it is not strictly airborne; This means that a non HEPA filter will likely stop it and that, from the return side; it's more likely to settle on the carpet or furniture than particularly infecting a human.
The more likely issue would be meetings of more than 1 person in a poorly ventilated room with no airflow; where aerosol virus would linger.
Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video),
I think there's an opportunity to self-organize people to address these things. Out among all of us us, there's enough expertise, desire and shared need.
Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education.
For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment.
That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.
As a parent it would need to be FOSS though.
So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other.
My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me.
As a parent, I see two big problems with it:
1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.)
2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.
I was a homeschooling parent and was, briefly, on the board of directors and the lead mod for an educational organization because of it.
Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed.
This is not true.
One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning.
Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three.
Public school teachers typically deal with classes of twenty or more students. Homeschooling parents have a much better student-teacher ratio and the one-on-one teaching is much more intensive than public school education.
You and your children will both experience rapid burnout if you try to spend eight hours a day actively teaching them. You don't need to and you really shouldn't. It's an unsustainable pace.
You can check Learn in Freedom for ideas etc, authored by tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult (he's a teacher by profession, but homeschooled his own kids):
https://learninfreedom.org/
We live in a rural area with essentially no school age kids nearby, so we're very aware that during summer, Christmas break, etc, we have to arrange ways to keep our 10 year-old in contact with kids his age. In summer we usually sign him up for the in-school daycare a couple days a week so he can see his friends and we also arrange to visit other families with kids he knows frequently, trips to the park, library, etc.
However, in the current situation, that's all gone flying out the window. A least, because of where we live, there's lots of space to go outside and play without coming into contact with anyone outside this household. I shudder to think how quickly we'd all go insane trapped in a small apartment!
And this is also exactly what I feel the people who are now pushing for online schooling in general don't get (apart from the fact there's a non-negligible part of the population that doesn't have consistent/good internet access). There's a lot more to school than just going and learning 'stuff that doesn't affect real life', as some seem to believe. It's about social learning as well, and they're completely underestimating how much this happens in schools.
Maybe you think social learning just happens by putting kids together, but that's bullshit. People like me who'd needed it the most didn't get any of it during school. There also wasn't much in regards to an education. In hindsight, school was a complete waste of my time, that at times negatively affected me because of bullies nobody did anything about. If only beating was still a thing when I went to school, then the teachers maybe would have beaten the shit out of the bullies, so they'd have to first spend a week in the hospital before getting suspended on top of that. Sorry, thinking of school always makes me angry.
Not to put too fine a point on it—but I don’t think that very many people who work in education think this way. Especially not the teachers running the classrooms. You leave children to their own devices and you get Lord of the Flies, which was written by William Golding, who based the book on his experiences as a schoolteacher.
My personal advice, as someone who “survived” school, is that intense feelings of anger in reaction to school add too much color. You have to wait and let the logical, non-angry patterns re-emerge in your own mind each time that anger reappears.
If you never had a friend all the way through college, you are nowhere the majority.
Without these measures a lot of folk will die a lot sooner than they should.
Isn't that same for every junior in high school? Are recruiters going to be happy to miss out an entire year?
Basically, anyone is disadvantaged who would normally have a small window of opportunity to prove something right now.
Not meaning to rant, just something I wanted to get off my chest since people keep talking about being trapped indoors when practising social distancing (not quarantine. people under quarantine need to stay as isolated as possible).
But as I said above, we, adults can understand and cope with it easier than kids. And sadly, when we make our decisions, needs of children often is an aftertought.
Unfortunately ppl with children are usually against company wide WFH flexible policies. I am guessing is just jealously. I have a coworker right now that asks ppl working from home in the morning meeting " oh so you are working from home today", so annoying.
Ppl with children please don't ruin it for the rest of us. we support you too.
Another thing that surprised me, many of my colleagues don't have a good working environment from home. They live in small appartements, sometimes with young kids, and mostly don't have an office or even a good laptop.
> Even the remote teams I know are struggling to get work done in the middle of this 24-hour news cycle of virus news and political battles about how to address it.
Agree. It takes self-discipline not to follow this to closely.
That's most likely the reason why they "work in the office by choice".
Back when I was still working in a physical office, I couldn't understand why someone would want to escape from their home into an office. As a WFH father of an infant, I fully get it now. Working with a small child nearby pretty much precludes any regular focus or deep working sessions.
> Agree. It takes self-discipline not to follow this to closely.
Indeed it does. I've never wasted so much time obsessively reading the news like over the past month.
I live in very small flat and I simply don't have space to separate work/home related stuff. I'm really struggling to focus on work task and when I finally do it I have problem to stop working (and end it too late). When in office someone will always ask why I'm still working or I will get hungry and food is waiting at home so I need to leave. Also video conferencing is poor replacement for talking with others.
Parents already get so many additional benefits at work compared to those without children, plus all the excuses to not do work/leave early. It’s discrimination.
I don’t feel sorry for them at all.
+1 for this. I'm 100% remote, as are many members of my org, and we're struggling to deal with the big changes happening. Webex and Zoom occasionally drop audio or just straight up drop people.
Also can't underestimate the kids thing. For example, my boss has 8 year olds who LOVE to sing as loudly as possible -- ask me how I know :)
From the perspectives of the companies it's also unfair to look at their hiring habits and speculate on their attitudes to working from home. Many companies are struggling to meet payroll, fighting with uncertainty, and desperately trying to form new communication structures in order to support the business. During such time, of course hiring is not going to be a priority.
Speculating on the outcome of this nightmare seems somewhat foolhardy, and extolling the virtues of working from home myopic given the many people who now find themselves struggling or out of work, ill, or forced to work in what are increasingly dangerous environments.
It's part of American work culture. It's a form of virtue signalling. By showing up at the office every workday, early in the morning, you are indicating your commitment to the company and to delivering value for their investment in you. Executives and managers won't give that important signal up.
"Showing up is 70% of everything." [Woody Allen]
There's a term for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presenteeism
WFH everyday is a joke.
Disclaimer, I have done a lot of remote work.
You need a company policy that gives at least a $1k budget for home office supplies like chairs and desks.
And you do need some offices for people to congregate to and for field operations if you have them. And you need policy to allow for personal office rental for those that don’t live within a commute to an office and can’t work at their home.
And employees need to get used to a more independent way of working. That they can set their own hours, etc.
I am working for a company where all decisions are made and communicated during lunch break in the canteen or near water cooler. At the moment the managers look pretty clueless, they have no idea how to start written communication.
Additionally, you want your employees to have a comfortable environment as it makes them more productive. If you're going to make your company a distributed company than you need to take some of the savings from not operating large offices and invest it in the remote experience.
In spite of this, I have been pretty worthless the last couple of weeks, primarily due to all the distractions of what’s going on.
When you consider that for many people, WFH started immediately with little time to prepare a proper setup, who are also trying to figure out how to be part-time teachers, PLUS the distraction of the current state of events, I suspect that most companies that didn’t do WFH before the crisis will reconvene when this is all behind us and say “WFH was a disaster, productivity was trash, and we’ll never do it again.”
If that happens, it would be a sad outcome, because under proper circumstances WFH can be a great lifestyle benefit with equal or greater productivity than an office environment.
As someone who's made a living in the restaurant sector most of their career, this is both terrifying but also exciting. Delivery was never the most exciting prospect because the economics were, for the most part, worse than dine-in, but in the absence of dine in maybe people will want expanded offerings? Lots of things to think about.
In my opinion, a bad economy is the best time to get an education. My extreme hope is getting closer to our cyborg future by furthering advancements in digital communication and human-computer interfacing.
Does anyone else worry that the natural progression from this mass WFH will simply lead to outsourcing in other countries instead of hiring American?
Now that companies are learning the hard way to WFH, and were seeing memes like “now we’ll know which meetings could have been emails,” does it concern you all that the next logical step is to double down on platforms facilitating a WFH culture during the inevitable recession? The last recession in 2007 saw very slow job growth (compared to other recessions) simply because companies opted to adopt technology rather than train+hire expensive labor. I fear that the next leap will be widespread prioritization to set up satellite offices in India and other countries where labor is cheap. If I were a Fortune 500 CEO, my top priority during the coming recession would be to offset the lack of H1Bs in the US and just go straight to the source- because I know every other CEO would be doing the same. I fear for my future prospects a year from now.
This may go hand-in-hand with a (degree of) rolling back the uber-capitalism of sacrificing long-term "anything and everything" for the potential of an immediate bump to the stock value.
For work that doesn't require a lot of communication and collaboration, it'll be easy to outsource to other countries, just like now.
For work that is intensely collaborative, having the team speaking one language in one (or adjacent) time zones is key.
I began doing remote work about 8 years ago while homeless. It was a good solution for my circumstances and it was a good solution for my health issues that were the actual root cause of my financial problems and homelessness.
Doing remote work has helped me protect my health and grow gradually healthier when that's not supposed to be possible. So I can't help but wonder how many people with serious health issues could be healthier if they lived more or less under quarantine.
I also homeschooled my special-needs sons for years. One if them has the same medical condition I have. They also have other issues.
As a homeschooling mom, I was a remote volunteer worker for an education related organization. They helped me get to a related conference on the other side of the continent where I was a very low level presenter.
I feel strongly that people with "quirks" -- health issues, ADHD, etc -- are the ones at the most risk of homelessness because they just can't make a "normal" life work and we do a generally poor job of telling people that there are lots of other ways to live and work, you just have to find the ones that work for you.
I've spent some years trying to develop websites and the like to help homeless people and people at risk of homelessness to find ways to make their lives work. I think remote work and other "irregular" work options are key to that.
I've never gotten much traction and the past decade has cured me of childhood brainwashing where I was always at the top of my class and the world around me kept saying I mattered and all. At this point, I'm quite convinced that I shall always be perpetually ignored.
I think I can make my own life work, so I sort of don't care anymore. But it seems like a missed opportunity because I already know so very much about germ control, working remotely, etc.
I'm not sure what my point is. I'm not sure I have a point or that there is any point to trying to talk to with people about this. Recent years have painted me as some kind of clown that no one should take seriously.
I think a lot of these decisions are going to de facto be made by the usual suspects for whom "normal" life works well, which is how and why they got into power. And I think that fact will help insure that people conclude that this doesn't really work and it needs to be temporary and it's imperative we return to "normal" as soon as possible.
But working from home was the historic norm. Family farms and craftspeople with a shop in one part of the building and their home in the same building and even retail establishments with the owners living upstairs was the norm for much of human history. Separating our living and working spaces is relatively recent. It's the weird and new thing.
My father was old enough to be my grandfather and I grew up with a garden in the backyard and a father who hunted and am mother who sewed a lot of my clothes. It was, in some ways, like a throwback to a prior century.
So those "old ways" are kind of living memory for me. And I never know how to effectively talk to people and say "No, seriously, it doesn't have to be this way. We don't have to accept these kinds of problems as the price for having a paycheck or something."
I hope we embrace a philosophy that gives people more options, not fewer. I hope we can find the opportunities and the upside in this situation.
But most people don't really want that. People don't like change. They hate hearing that something like this has a silver lining. So I'm not very optimistic that we will.
But a lot of people treat work as more than a transaction. That's fair but not for everyone.
Oh this life i chose is so hard. Potty me. Let me barely work, but still collect my entire paycheck.
Booooohoooooo
Don't allow the stress of the situation to color your judgement of work from home. It is a good thing in our modern time.